VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (letter).

Fueling cars

February 13, 2003|By A.R. Martin.

Ft. Myers, Fla. — The Jan. 31 editorial "The hydrogen car (pipe?) dream," in opposition to government subsidies for fuel cell development, missed the point. The real problem is that fuel cells are not "non-polluting" and will not solve our energy problems.

While it is true that the exhaust of a hydrogen-burning car produces only water, you have to ask where the hydrogen came from. A great deal of it would be extracted from hydrocarbons, such as petroleum, natural gas or alcohol, in which case hydrogen production is accompanied by the production of carbon dioxide, the pollutant of greatest concern.

Furthermore hydrogen extraction costs energy. If we use methane (natural gas) as an example, it is more efficient to burn methane directly than to make hydrogen as an intermediate fuel. And it is no more polluting: direct methane combustion and hydrogen extraction from methane produce the same amounts of carbon dioxide.

Another approach would be to use electricity to extract hydrogen from water and then burn the hydrogen to produce electricity. In that scenario the electricity produced by hydrogen combustion would be no more than half the amount it took to extract the hydrogen, hardly an efficient approach to our energy problems.

No matter how it is produced, the use of hydrogen as a fuel would increase our energy demand in order to meet the cost of hydrogen extraction and, because of that increase in demand, increase carbon dioxide production. Both these results are the exact opposite of what is claimed for fuel cells.